Wednesday 2 May 2007

Dehydrating Take 2

Being a lazy oik, I bought some microwave meals at the supermarket specifically to nuke then dehydrate. £2.00 - £2.60 for 800grammes per meal.

DSC03344s MealsDSC03344s Meals Hosted on Zooomr

Wearing my lead apron and goggles, the microwave pinged away one meal after another. I was concerned about the sauces dripping off the edges of the parchment roll that I put on the base of the tray. Forgetting that nuking sauces for 8 minutes makes the sauce fairly stodgy. I pre-loaded trays away from the dehydrator, so that drips were caught on a tea-tray.

DSC03345s SetupDSC03345s Setup Hosted on Zooomr

As the meals were being cooked and stacked on trays with baking parchment roll (from Lakeland) and I cut a hole in the middle. In the foreground is the beef jerky (£2.50 for all that frying beef). I've roughly marinated it in soy sauce, garlic granules and some sugar - just what I had in. Adding parchment to the base of the tray below the jerky stops it dripping onto the cooked meals below.

DSC03346s Ready to rollDSC03346s Ready to roll Hosted on Zooomr
All set up, with the clockwork timer plug counting down, and will switch the unit off after 7 hours. As this is a basic dehydrator, it doesn't come with such advanced features as a timer (link to examples). I'll see what's left tomorrow morning. Maybe it will all be dust?

8 comments:

Londonbackpacker said...

I use microwave meals as well, saves a lot of time preparing all the ingredients.

They always work as well as madehome.

Darren Christie said...

Shocking both of you. I can just see you both on MAster Chef Goes Large, sitting there until 5 mnutes from the ending nuking a Food Doctor meal to hand to them ^__^

On the other hand Aktoman, try getting hold of a copy of Just Jerky by Mary Bell you will find it very useful ;)

Andy Howell said...

You may well find that 7 hours is not long enough!

AktoMan said...

Darren - I'm at work, and there's no way I'm going to follow up a lead like that on a school network!

AktoMan said...

Andy - yup, pasta still moist this morning. I'll give it some more hours tonight, as didn't have time to play before heading out this morning.

AktoMan said...

George - glad to here it isn't just me using pre-cooked. Now, if only I could get the fish supper in there, I'd be a very happy bunny ;-)

Anonymous said...

That looks like a lot of hard work. You do realise that it's possible to just buy already dehydrated food ? ;o)

AktoMan said...

Aye, Simon. I've some of the Norwegian ones. Great meals, well made, easy to re-hydrate, fills me. But cost just under a fiver for a main meal.

If I can cut that by a half, then I can get twice as much for the money.

I was getting fed up with either expensive or cheap-n-cheerful.

Just in case things go horribly wrong..."fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman" (washed down with a fine quianti, ffffff).

Sleep well tomorrow night ;-)